Billion Dollar Math- None Paper 2
By Steven Wöndu
August 8, 2012 — On August 2nd 2012, Mr Mapuor Malual Manguen announced in the Citizen newspaper that the Nimule-Juba ‘paved highway is about to be inaugurated’. It will be the first hard surface road in South Sudan. The 192-kilometres road with eight bridges cost the citizens of the United States of America 220 million dollars (US$ 220,000,000). The reporter was quoting the Deputy Minister of Roads and Bridges. It cannot get any more authoritative than that. South Sudan Oyee!
We have not been informed how long it took to construct this road but we all know that it is a product of the CPA era. If, during that period we invested 4 billion dollars out of our oil revenue in similar road works, South Sudan would be interconnected to an extent none of us can imagine. Let us crunch the numbers. Four billion dollars is four thousand million dollars (US$4,000,000,000). Divide that by 220,000,000. The answer is 18 (to the nearest decimal point). We would by now or very soon be having 18 tarmac roads of 192 kilometres each with 144 (8×18) bridges in South Sudan. Let us say 100 bridges since some of them will be much longer than the one of Kit. Moreover, since the roads cannot be equidistant, let us say that we would be having a total of 3,456 (18×192) more kilometres of tarmac in South Sudan. Given that construction costs increase as the roads get farther from materials supply points, we can discount our coverage to, say, 3000 kilometres of tarmac. Now we know, a tarmac road costs a little more than one million dollars per kilometre in this part of South Sudan ($220,000,000 ÷ 192 km).
Recently, the African Union inaugurated its brand new Headquarters in Addis Ababa. It cost the Chinese US$ 200 million, about the same amount the Americans spent on the Nimule-Juba highway. The African Union building has a 20 storey tower. So if we chose to use our 4 billion on constructing high rise structures, we would be having 20 African Union size skyscrapers in South Sudan today, other things like costs and engineering being equal. We could have donated one to the African Union, allocated one to each of our ten States and kept 9 for the capital city. No other city in Africa would compare to ours, not even Johannesburg.
There are thousands of alternative usages to which money can be applied. How many water wells, dams, tones of medicines, acres of crop farms, schools would the country have created with 4 billion dollars? The transformation 4 billion dollars could have done to this young nation is mind boggling.
We could have saved the 4 billion in the Bank of South Sudan (BOSS). If we had it now, we would have afforded to finance our government for two years without oil revenue and without borrowing.
By-the-way, the number one million is no small thing. Professor Chinua Achebe teaches us in The Trouble with Nigeria that from the day Jesus Christ was born up to today is not yet one million days. It will be only 734, 803 days by December 25th, the product of 2012 years times 365.25 days per year on average. In other words, a person who has a million dollars and lives on one dollar a day would not run out of money for 2,737 years. Inflation is set off against interest income.
The author is South Sudan Auditor General